[rsynnott]

I mean, see Doctor Strangelove. If you have a doomsday weapon, that’s only helpful if you _tell_ people about it! If China had built loads of warheads, they’d hardly keep that secret, as most of these point of having loads of warheads is for everyone else to know you had them.

Realistically, by the time China and France got on the nuclear scene, doctrine had shifted from “nuclear torpedos, nuclear guns, nuclear landmines, nuclear everything” to “you have some submarines with missiles; you can have other stuff if you want, but no-one cares about it”. There’s little point in having thousands of warheads, these days.

(The UK did briefly go down the ‘nuclear everything’ road, but pulled back for cost/sanity reasons)

[seanmcdirmid]

I meant that your data is out of date, and China has moved quickly in the last ten years. They went in the last ten years from being able to just hit the west coast to hitting all the way up to the Midwest, do you think they won’t have some amount of increased coverage in the next, especially with their space program accelerating their ICBM program?

The truth is that China hit MAD awhile ago and doesn’t really need to play up or even build much more on its nuclear arsenal. They are better off investing in conventional warfare for the near term, and especially in new arms like drones that give them an actual advantage in future conflicts.